Clouds in a Glass of Iced Beer

Bob Grumbine's post Experimental Reading made me look out my copy of "CLOUDS in a GLASS of BEER" by Craig F. Bohren. The book is as entertaining as its title suggests, consisting of a series of articles describing "Simple Experiments in Atmospheric Physics".

I bought my copy before I took a serious interest in earth science. When I first realised that AGW was a real threat, that book was the only one of which I knew where a serious scientist had expressed doubts about those dangers. Rereading it now, I see that what he wrote may explain why my sea ice prediction this year went so wrong.

He wrote that the dispute over global warming was between those who thought that feedbacks played a major role (e.g. Jim Hansen) and those who did not (e.g. Dick Lindzen.) To explain feedbacks he uses as an example a toy box that was popular in the early 1980's. He wrote

"The best example of feedback that I have ever seen was a black box on the side of which was a toggle switch and a sign: DO NOT TURN ON. Perhaps you could resist the temptation, but I couldn't. The result was, after some grinding and whirring from inside the box, that the lid opened, a hand emerged, turned off the switch, and then withdrew back into the box. Turning on the switch eventually led to a feedback which eventually turned it off. And so it is also with the atmosphere. One possibility, for example, might be that warming the oceans will result in more water vapour in the atmosphere and, as a consequence, more clouds. But this might lead to more solar radiation scattered to space, hence lower temperatures."

As an electrical engineer, I did not feel that this was a good example of feedback. There are two types of feedback - positive and negative. This box is a horrible example of both. The small mechanical operation of a switch is amplified to become a lid opening and the hand emerging, so showing positive feedback. But the switch being operated and the system returning back to its original state is a negative feedback. The two types of feedback have been combined in an unholy alliance.

I also found his atmospheric example flawed. If warming the oceans causes more clouds, and clouds cause cooling, then when that cooling occurred the clouds would disappear and the ocean surface would warm again. Therefore, if more atmospheric CO2 causes the sea surface to warm, and more clouds to form, then we cannot have a net cooling otherwise there would be less clouds than before and the planet would warm again.

However what is possible is that one summer we have the oceans warmed by clear skies, and the following summer these warm seas create more clouds cooling the oceans. The result would be a biennial oscillation in sea surface temperatures. Of course the cycle could take longer than two years, and then that describes ENSO, the El Nino Southern Oscillation. During an El Nino the Pacific Ocean is covered in cloud and the water which has accumulated in the Warm Pool loses its heat to the atmosphere.

So this is where I went wrong with My Arctic sea ice prediction. I was arguing that the positive feedback from ice-albedo effect must drive on the continuous reduction in the size of the sea ice extent. However, an unknown and invisible hand has emerged and switched off the melting process. In fact it is probably the one that Craig Bohren mentioned - clouds. The thinner ice in the Arctic is forming more leads and so releasing more water vapour into the air. This is forming clouds which is preventing the sun from having its full effect on the ice, so inhibiting the ice-albedo effect. But as I explained, this mechanism cannot reverse the sea ice retreat, only slow it.

If we finally emerge from the current solar minimum, will next year see another major sea ice retreat?

My Weird Pet Aversion

This blog is supposed to be an antidote to the RealClimate blog. I have been too busy getting on with real science to bother posting here, but PETM Weirdness is related to my work so I thought I would attack them here rather than there.

Gavin's post is about a press release regarding the latest paper on the Methane 'Belch' which caused the minor extinction that marked the change from Paleocene to Eocene epochs 55 million years ago. Global temperatures during the Paleocene were similar to the the hot house world of the Cretaceous when the dinosaurs roamed the world, but the methane belch raised the temperatures even higher. We know the cause was methane because of the change in the fraction of carbon 13 that is recorded in fossils from that time. The problem is that the greenhouse effect of the estimated amount of methane, or of the carbon dioxide if the methane burned, does not account for the large rise in temperature. Obviously the models are wrong, and that is what the press release said and the title of the paper implied: Carbon dioxide forcing alone insufficient to explain Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum warming.

Gavin, as a climate modeller, plays down that issue despite the quotation in the press release from one of the authors which reads:

"In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record," said oceanographer Gerald Dickens, a co-author of the study and professor of Earth science at Rice University. "There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models."

Instead, he mentions the point that this implies warming will be worse rather than less as the deniers are claiming. Then he rambles off contradicting what he has just said. He argues that the back of an envelope calculations done twenty years ago are still accurate, citing Annan and Hargreave's paper as proof. But that paper, like the estimate it justifies is merely calculates an average. It is meaningless for describing the behaviour of a non-linear system.

Gavin admits that the polar regions will warm more than the tropics, so the climate sensitivity in one region is different from that in another. The Zeebe et al paper is saying that the climate sensitivity during the Paleo-Eocene transitiorn was different from now. And the abrupt changes before and after the Younger Dryas don't fit with today'st climate sensitivity either. So not only does climate sensitivity vary geographically, it varies temporally too.

Changing it name from Charney Sensitivity to Earth System Sensitivity does not solve the problem. Sensitivity is just as chaotic as the surface temperature. Or if there is a carbon dioxide sensitivity, a fixed relationship between carbon dioxide concentration and its forcing, then it is clear we have not found it yet. That means the models are not correct - they are wrong!

As I see it, the danger is that by insisting that it is only weather that is chaotic, and that climate is linear, the potential for abrupt climate change is being ignored. The scientific establishment, excluding Hansen, Lovelock and Broecker, are too conservative to accept that catastrophe is around the corner. RealClimate is not fighting skepticism, it is breeding complacency.

Error in OLR Model?

My abstract for a poster at the Royal Meteorological Society's Conference has been accepted, but its formatting was lost before it was posted on the conference web site. Here it is laid out more neatly:

The standard model for outgoing long-wave radiation (OLR) views the atmosphere as a series of parallel slabs. It is assumed that each slab is in a state of local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) where the temperature of the slab can be used to determine its emission using Planck’s function. This leads to Schwarzschild’s equation:

dI = - Ikρ dz + B(T)kρ dz .............................. Equ. 1

where I is the intensity, k is the absorption coefficient, ρ is the density, z is the vertical coordinate and B(T) is Planck’s blackbody function at the temperature T of the slab.

However, the infra-red emissions from greenhouse gases have wavelengths of 20 microns and less, which requires a vibrational temperature of 719 K and more. Few molecules attain that temperature in the Earth’s atmosphere, and so the IR emissions of greenhouse gases are "frozen out". The value of T used in Equ. 1 should be the vibrational temperature and not the kinetic (or translational) temperature as is used at present.

This error has profound consequences, because it means that the outgoing long-wave radiation (OLR) in the greenhouse gas bands is completely absorbed in the lower 30 m of the atmosphere. Therefore the surface temperature has little effect on the OLR which is in fact emitted by the greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere. Thus radiation balance is mainly achieved by the incoming short-wave radiation (ISR) being altered by cloud cover, as originally proposed by G. C. Simpson.

This also explains why weather models fail to calculate the correct height for the cloud base, and why climate models are unable to exhibit the runaway greenhouse effect of water vapour which happens during abrupt climate change.

More McDonald meta-Science.

I placed a long comment on Bob Grumbine's blog More Grumbine Science, but have had no reaction [I have now :-)]. Bob was arguing that you can tell the difference between science and pseudo-science by the amount of evidence. As an example of pseudo-science he used the idea of a flat earth. I pointed out that the overwhelming evidence I have is that the earth is indeed flat! It is only because of reports I have had, secondary evidence such as the lesson in geography from my junior school teacher in whose utterances I had blind faith, that I now believe otherwise. Thus Bob's technique for distinguishing science from pseudo-cience is far too simplistic.

I have been re-reading State of Fear by Michael Crichton, for a writing course I am taking. The theme of this blockbuster is difficult to summarise. It takes the author twelve pages to state it in two appendices that follow the novel. Suffice it to say that a fellow student who had also read the book had been persuaded that global warming was not something to be worried about.

The technique Crichton uses is to present all the evidence against global warming and none to support it, while claiming that he is giving a balanced summary. Thus his evidence is impeccable, and would pass Bob's test. However, the book is just science fiction. What he has done is to use agnotology, a term introduced to me by John Mashey, another commentator on Bob's Blog. Although the word is new to me the concept is not. I have long been aware that my deepest convictions could be altered by new facts. That was even before Donald Rumsfeld came out with his inimitable lines:

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

Agnotology is not about "known unknowns". It is about "unknown unknowns". Michael Crichton gives examples of papers which show the Antarctic was not cooling, but he does not quote the papers which show the Artic ice is thinning. For my fellow student, and perhaps Crichton, this was an unkown unknown. So pseudo-science is not about quantity of evidence. Pseudo-science is about supressing some of the evidence that conflicts with the thesis.

Sir Issac Newton has a lot to answer for. He put physical science on a mathematical footing. Since we know that mathematics is always correct, we infer that science too is always true. But for natural science there are always unknown unknowns. This is especially true of the earth sciences such as geology. Earth sciences are mainly non-mathematical, and new things are being discovered every day - both uknown knowns and unknowns unknowns become known knowns.

Michael Crichton claims in State of Fear:

I am certain there is too much certainty in the world."

Nice joke, but true! Unknown unknows are ignored because no one knows that they are there!

His final claims is:

"Everyone has an agenda. Except me."

Well my agenda is that you should not trust scientists, especially mathematicians. They believe all of science is true, ignoring the unknown unknows. Why even that mathematical pioneer Euclid was wrong. In the real world the sum of the angles in a triangle are not 180 degrees. We do not live on a flat earth. We live on a sphere where the angles of a triangle can sum up to almost 360 degrees!

Climate Crunch

“Whether it is hiring people over fifty, or acting on climate change, it won’t happen unless people are pushed.” Aged 51 and, having admitted that he was an unemployed victim of the Credit Crunch, obviously he spoke from his heart. What a pity Dr Vicky Pope, the Met Office's leading adviser on climate change to the government, was not there to hear him.


The previous week in the Guardian Newspaper she was quoted as saying: “News headlines vie for attention and it is easy for scientists to grab this attention by linking climate change to the latest extreme weather event or apocalyptic prediction. But in doing so, the public perception of climate change can be distorted. The reality is that extreme events arise when natural variations in the weather and climate combine with long-term climate change. This message is more difficult to get heard. Scientists and journalists need to find ways to help to make this clear, without the wider audience switching off."

How does she think that the message can be got across by scientists if they do not try to grab the headlines? She admits that if the public are told the boring truth then they will switch off. Isn’t it better that people have half the truth than no truth at all?



Meanwhile in the February issue of the Royal Meteorological Society’s magazine “Weather” Simon Keeling of the University of Birmingham’s Weather Consultancy Services asked “Could we be in danger of raising the public’s understanding of climate change to a level beyond that of the current science?” Presumably by that he does not mean the public are being converted into Einsteins, but rather he too is worried that the dangers of climate change are being exaggerated.



But you don’t get people to buy house insurance by telling them that their home might not burn down, despite the fact that it is most likely true! Nor do you get people to give up flying to Thailand for their annual holiday, nor abandoning their car and using public transport, by downplaying the dangers of climate change. It seems from what these two scientists wrote that they do not see a major danger from global warming.



Perhaps that is because they are unaware of the facts. For instance, Dr Pope continued with a reference to the Arctic sea ice. She wrote "The record-breaking losses in the past couple of years could easily be due to natural fluctuations in the weather.” But these losses are almost certainly due to the thinning of the sea ice which has been happening as a result of climate change. In fact the recent contraction in the area of summer ice is well outside the limits set by natural variability over the last twenty years.



As Julienne Stroeve, from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union: “The sea ice is entering a new state where the ice cover has become so thin that no matter what happens during the summer in terms of temperature or circulation patterns, you're still going to have very low ice conditions."



Chris Field was a coordinating lead author of the fourth assessment report (AR4) produced by the IPCC, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. Field believes that the dire warnings about the oncoming devastation wrought by global warming were not dire enough. The same day as Dr Pope’s comments were published he wrote "We now have data showing that from 2000 to 2007, greenhouse gas emissions increased far more rapidly than we expected." The 2007 AR4 presented at a "very conservative range of climate outcomes" but the next report will "include futures with a lot more warming," Field said. "We now know that, without effective action, climate change is going to be larger and more difficult to deal with than we thought" the Telegraph reported.



So rather than the dangers being exaggerated, they have been down played. The Credit Crunch may well be followed by a Climate Crunch. In this age of gender equality who can rule out that Dr Pope may not be the first female head of the Met Office. If there is a climate catastrophe how will she behave. Will she, unlike the ex-chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland who led the British economy to disaster, accept responsibility and refuse to take her pension?

What Gavin Schmidt should have written

This ComplexClimate blog was set up as an antidote to RealClimate. I don't really want to fall out with that crew, so since I see a way of saying he is wrong without causing offence I am going to post what I consider a better response to George Will than Gavin's latest blog on that subject.


George F. Will's Op-Ed for the Washington Post "Dark Green Doomsayers" begins: A corollary of Murphy's Law ("If something can go wrong, it will") is: "Things are worse than they can possibly be." That is false; there is no such corollary. Murphy's Law is itself a corollary of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which can be stated as disorder always increases. It is not a mantra of the pessimist. It is a scientific law which is absolutely true. If something can happen and you wait long enough it will happen.


Most times you don't have to wait very long. Just think of those poor scientists in the 1970s who had discovered that the climate changes suddenly. They had evidence that the last ice age ended in less than 50 years. (Now we think the climate of Greenland jumped 20 F in three years.) Moreover the global climate had been cooling from a peak in 1945, see adjacent figure from the CRU Information Sheet , so they were worried that a new ice age would start soon. They wrote a letter to the President of the USA, but Murphy's Law struck and temperatures rose!


So now what is going to happen? Well if something can go wrong it will, and the Arctic ice looks as though it could disappear suddenly. All I can say is that it will happen this summer, and hope that I fall victim to Murphy's Law and am proved wrong :-(

PS. Wikipedia has a list of corollaries to Murphy's Law. I thought I had better check them in case I was doing George Will a disservice, and "Thing are worse than they could possible be" was there. I shouldn't have worried. The second entry in that list is wrong, so the list is unreliable anyway. Item 2 states "Anything dropped in the bathroom will fall in the toilet (or the sink)." I had an ink jet cartridge today that was leaking, and when I took it to the sink, it fell on the bathroom carpet. So much for Wikipedia!

Real Climate? - I think not.

Here's a comment that I posted on RealClimate which has not appeared. Presumable that is because it does not say: "Thank you for giving us hope,...", "Wonderfully hopeful.", "Thank you.", or "David, thanks ..." all which appear in the first 6 published comments. I thought scientists were supposed to be sceptical. The lot replying to RealClimate just seem to be sycophants.

Anyway, RealClimate's latest epistle is entitled “Irreversible Does Not Mean Unstoppable”. It discusses a paper in PNAS by Susan Solomon et al. which "shows that the climate change that takes place due to increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop. " David Archer's spin is that once we stop emitting fossil fuels the increase in temperate will stop. So we need not be terrified by Susan Solomon's paper.

What I wrote was:
************
Well, all I can say is that you have excelled yourselves in this post. It is nothing but denialist rubbish. You state:

"It is not really news scientifically that atmospheric CO2 concentration stays higher than natural for thousands of years after emission of new CO2 to the carbon cycle from fossil fuels. "

So that is all right then. We don’t have to worry unless the levels of greenhouse gases increase. How are you going to prevent that? Stop burning all fossil fuels? That is the only way!

The Arctic sea ice is retreating and the glaciers are melting worldwide. This will reduce global albedo and raise sea level temperatures, so the oceans will release more CO2 even if we stop adding fossil fuels now.

When are you going to face up to the fact that the world is heading for disaster. Unless we take panic measures we are all doomed.

**************

Perhaps I have been too hard on the poor boy who was only trying to counter the real sceptics and deniers who are now claiming it is too late. But all this pussyfooting with public opinion has been going on for too long. The IPCC may have achieved a Nobel Prize but the have singularly fail to get any action from the worlds leading greenhouse gas producers: China, India and the US. In fact since the Kyoto treaty was drawn up the US has increased it emissions of CO2 by an amount equal to the total emissions of the UK.

There is a little hope. Barak Obama seems to be moving towards taking action, but he cannot do all that needs doing without the backing of Congress. Congress only respond to their voters and the voters, Congressmen and Senators must be told how serious the problem is.

Cheers, Alastair.